Hello,
This is my 72l (approx 19gallon) stocked with 11 rummy nose tetras and 5 pygmy cories.
The top is what it was a month ago, bottom is what I came back to. I left the house for a month for a vacation and left my mom with a list of what to do – a caresheet.
I told her to feed the rummy nose tetras once a day in small amounts and drop a wafer every 2nd day for the pygmy cories.
There were other details to prevent a nitrate spike that I resolved a week before leaving. The water was treated with Tetra products that minimize nitrate and a conditioner for water changes. It was also treated with Seachem Prime. The ph at the time was about 7.5, nitrates and nitrites have stabilized to healthy amounts.
Now, the plants have decayed and the nutritional substrate has made its way through the sand. Algae is everywhere. I suddenly have 2 new snails I did not see before. My fish seem ok, but I do not want to keep them in this condition, I planned to rescape the tank as soon as I'd come back home as I knew there were flaws in the scape (thin sand layer, some plants were planted in spaces I didn't want them to be in)
All plants had nutritional tabs. I do not use Co2.
Light was on for only 8 hours a day.
I don't know what happened, but I am shattered that mom didn't report to me about this. When I asked her about it, she said 'it looks fine'. She isn't a fishkeeper, but I thought the caresheet would be good enough (I can provide it for proof, though it is in Czech.)
What do I do? I don't want to re-do this entire fishtank and make my fish even more stressed. I want to preserve as much material from the fishtank as possible, including the old substrate that I will simply clean up a little, add new tabs and put another layer of much heavier substrate on top.
I'm going to test for ammonia as soon as I finish testing for my other fishtank with a betta and now a whole swarm of cherry red shrimp. The tank's stable, it just needs cleaning, but suddenly there's another species of snail and half of my plants are gone (I will elaborate about this in the comments as it is less relevant)
Posted by __markn0rth
3 Comments
About my 25l. I have a single betta here (who used to have a cyst but he recovered!) and a swarm of cherry red shrimp. I have unidentifiable snails inside but Im hoping my assassin snails will take care of that. The cycle is okay despite how much mess there was. I tested for ammonia and there is none. I did a 50% water change and cleaned up most of the waste the shrimp produce.
Half of my plants are gone. Idk what happened.
(First picture is the before. I’ll reply with the after. A month later.)
(Unlike for my 19gallon, this tank has been set up a year ago. It is much more established.)
https://preview.redd.it/0ui8yj5w06gf1.jpeg?width=4000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=13bb92d230904231406b696a0861ccb9684bbe0e
Im so sorry this happened 💔 she or someone definitely fucked around with the tank. Substrate doesn’t rearrange itself like this (and pygmy cories are definitely not the culprit).
The random snails arent a big issue btw.
Don’t rescape, just siphone all the dirt, add new layer of sand if needed, scrap the glass from algae, add new plants. It will be alright!
Your filter is kinda small for the tank, I’d suggest to do external canister filter tbh, it helps to have tank cleaner and have big established colony of good bacteria.